tony arkles blog

Today I start a new journey. I’ve left my otherwise fantastic job at VendAsta to start my M.Sc. in Computer Science. I’ve been working in industry for 2.5 years now, and I figured I’d like to spend more time focused on learning and growing.

I haven’t picked a thesis topic yet, but it’s likely to be related to distributed computing. I’m going to be working in the DISCUS lab at the University of Saskatchewan, with my long-time friend and mentor, Dwight Makaroff.

It’s the first day of class, and I’m just getting settled in. I don’t have desk space yet (turns out that no one is around the DISCUS lab at 8:00am…), but I’ve snaked a table in the lab and already it feels like home.

I’m going to try to be more organized this time around (some know about the chaos that was my undergrad career). I’m going to try to incorporate some of the principles from the excellent Study Hacks blog; in particular, I’m going to do The Unsinkable Student Organization System. For time management, I think I’m going to give The Pomodoro Technique a shot, especially for writing assignments.

Also, like I mentioned before, I’m going to start my Language-a-month plan, and I think I’m going to start with Clojure.

I’ve been going through the exercises from 6.184 – Zombies drink caffeinated 6.001; in particular, the RSA example. I started doing that one a while ago in DrScheme, and figured I’d revisit it with Clojure. I’m planning on posting about it within the next few days, as soon as I get over a strange mental block that I’ve hit with the Extended Euclidean Algorithm. In the original exercise, the code for this was given, but it’s not quite Clojure-compatible, so I’m reimplementing it…